by Rebecca Cole Michelle Obama departs Tuesday for her inaugural European trip as First Lady, joining husband Barack as he makes the rounds during the G-20 summit in London. With much ink already spilt over the first lady's style -...

Do you get obsessive about food-related things? I do. (See Brownberry Bread.) This usually happens when it becomes extremely difficult to track something down.My latest obsession is Murchie's tea, possibly because I'm having trouble finding the one I...

by Mary Rourke Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic, the ocean-liner that sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean, died today. She was 97. She died at...

Little bistro, huge impact. Like a different sort of miracle of the five loaves and two fishes, Chez Panisse, the landmark Berkeley restaurant, and its founder and guiding spirit, Alice Waters, have leveraged a small temple of slow, local and organic food into a massive force in the culinary world. Now that appetite for a new/old food culture has begun to register on the public's consciousness, if not always on its plate. Waters is clearing her table of most everything but the Edible Schoolyard Project:...

Dear Amy: My middle daughter (I have three children) is 18 years old and a senior in high school. She has been a challenge to me, as she has always been very private about her emotions and what is going on in her daily life.
Over the last several months, I have noticed her withdrawing from friends and activities, and spending large amounts of time in her room watching movies on her computer. She will not talk to me and in fact gave me a 10-day silent treatment when she was caught trying to skip classes....

Although its setting is 18th century Versailles and its central character is the wife of Louis XVI and the erstwhile queen of France, you could chop the noggin off the Steppenwolf Theatre's blithely anachronistic but fundamentally insecure new production of David Adjmi's "Marie Antoinette" before anything or anyone admitted they were in a historical drama.
The Adjmi Text and Robert O'Hara's production are as one in this determination, typified by the Versailles tourist video that begins the show, even...

Barry Humphries sat at a table overlooking the pool of his Beverly Hills hotel and blew his nose. He had just arrived from his home in London and was suffering with a common cold — something it's hard to imagine ever getting the better of his imperious (and better known) alter ego, Dame Edna.
But even under the weather, Humphries, an Australian gentleman of prodigious build and even more prodigious wit, couldn't resist unleashing a fusillade of delicious quips and subversive sallies.
While...

In 1978, before the merger of show business and politics was complete, it was still possible to build a show with the shocking premise that a working-class actress with a body and a dream could seduce a military leader and an entire nation. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber — whose audacious, thrilling musical had a teenage version of your humble correspondent sitting, wide-eyed, in the balcony of London's Prince Edward Theatre — launched their mega-hit before the election of an actor to the U....